auspex: So, you noticed why gnome-games is never maintained for a large amount of time by a single person? The code is hellish as much of it has been incrementally edited over many years.

I was the gnome-games maintainer up to... well... a few hours ago now, and didn't really have the time to seriously attack the code and clean it all up. Crufty code is why I was removing games which are not used. Luckily Callum McKenzie (the new maintainer) appears to have more free time that I do, which is good.

I do feel that the games have a far better look than they did in GNOME 2.0, but there is still a long way to go. Hopefully Callum can carry on the way he started -- which was very well, within a day of getting cvs commit access a serious amount of code was committed and a release was made -- and rework the code.

Does anyone set aside a day to refactor, to fix bugs, to close bugs, to look for bugs?

At work we spend serious amounts of time refactoring as required, but I do think this is something which not enough people do. Refactoring doesn't need to be done often, and when it does it has to be done carefully, but a time slot for checking bug reports/fixing open bugs is a very good idea.